The Girls' Room

This is not HGTV and I am no design star, but this has been a fun project!  Our home is nothing you're going to see in a magazine, but it is home and we try to make it nice within the parameters that we have as renters.  So...if this project had a sponsor, it would be 3M Command Strips! ;-) Anyway, earlier this year we flipped the girls' room for the play/craft/music/other stuff room.  At that point we considered lofting their beds and they latched onto that idea.  They have spent hours browsing the web for loft beds, designing them to build themselves, dreaming, shopping for desks to put under the lofts...you know...being little girls with a dream.  When they were gone in May Scott and I said, "Hey, we should do this project while they are gone!" but it was the end of the school year and he had guests in town and we were just too busy, so we penciled it in for this week.

We had planned to build the beds ourselves, but I hopped onto Craigslist on Monday and found this set of beds that someone else had already done all the hard work on!  They are very nice and well made, so we arranged to pick them up on Monday night (this is a highly simplified version of this story--I've left out the numerous emails to people with loft beds that were already sold/too big/unanswered, etc.--Craigslist can be so great and so frustrating at the same time!) If you look closely in the pictures you'll see they have the other girls' names routed onto the side.  The guy we bought them from is making new name plates with our girls' names on them to cover up.  When we arrived to pick up the beds we found out that Scott actually knows the guy!  His company is doing some work at the tunnel, so he'll deliver the new name plates next week when he's out working at the tunnel.

So.  On to the room.  Scott and I assembled the loft beds on Monday night and I hauled the old bunk beds out on Tuesday and hauled borrowed desks from school over.  We stored all of our desks last year and used folding tables from Costco and we loved it!  No sense in buying desks that we can borrow indefinitely for free!  I grabbed some cans to store writing implements in from the dollar spot at Target yesterday.  I also grabbed these fun wire baskets to hang as shelves up in the bed.  Credit for that idea goes to Pinterest.

Stacy's

Kelsey's

You need a spot for your book, glasses, clock, etc.  I bought these battery powered clocks for them and they both got clip-on fans too.  Their room gets the early morning sun, so it can be uncomfortably warm, but no one wants to have the sun shining in at 3am either!

What they wanted most out of this whole project was a space of their own, so I grabbed some cheapie flat twin-sized sheets yesterday and some cafe rods and made them curtains so the under loft part can feel like their own space.

Nothing fancy.  I thought about cutting and hemming the sheet so it would pull apart in the middle but decided against it.  If we decide we want to later we can, but for now we'll try it this easy way.  It's nice and private under there when you close the curtain!

The only other thing I made was this additional seating spot/stuffed animal/doll storage.  I grabbed a couple of sturdier totes from WalMart and added a cheapie pillow into shams we already had and voila!  Storage and a seat in one!  If this was HGTV I would have tried harder to hide those cords. Have you ever seen a cord on one of their shows?  Oh well...this is real life over here!

I am sure the girls will work to further personalize their spaces, but I am also excited for them to come home to this surprise.  They had no idea what Scott and I were planning, so they are going to be shocked at the changes!